August 22, 2005

For a new film, "The Constant Gardener," Focus Features is intent on building its audience in a different way: by taking aim at readers of niche Web sites and blogs...

James Schamus, a co-president of the studio, says that such sites draw the sort of people most likely to appreciate the film, a conspiracy thriller based on a John le Carré novel about pharmaceutical companies operating in Africa.

"We looked for the places that sophisticated moviegoers seek out to find things that interest them," Mr. Schamus said. "These are the people who are engaged with the world, who are informed about the big conspiracies going on out there."...

[T]he ads for "The Constant Gardener" seem to seek out people who distrust multinational corporations. The banner contains the taglines "The corruption is contagious" and "The conspiracy is global," and links to the film's Web site, where snippets of dialogue about "payoffs, cover-ups, unmarked graves" can be heard in the trailer.

So the conspiracy movie gets advertised on blogs where they think conspiracy-minded readers congregate. It will be interesting to see, over time, which blogs get the most movie advertising. Are conspiracy theory hothead bloggers going to reap in the cash as Hollywood goes for complicated thrillers? I wonder if there's a type of movie that would do well to advertise here.

In this case, they should advertise it on conspiracy minded blogs of the extreme left, thin, anti-American type. I read the book. In a word it sucked.

OTOH, mmm Rafe Fiennes. And the movie is only based on the book. And mmm Rafe Fiennes.

I guess this story about blog advertising, goes hand in glove with the big story last week about how the studios were no longer going to be advertising as much in newspapers. I bet blogs are a whole lot cheaper.

"Ever since the release of "The Blair Witch Project" in 1999, movie studios have strived, and failed, to replicate the groundbreaking Internet campaign that made that film a marketing phenomenon. These new ad campaigns on the Web suggest that studios are becoming more determined to identify and reach niche audiences online."

File this under “everything old is new again. See this 4-year-old story about the spiral marketing of Speilberg’s AI.

Here’s a new one they could have mentioned, Blowing Smoke. You can download it or buy the DVD. They’ve also hired one of the funniest people on the internet to run the blog - Jim Treacher.

ExcerptMy good friend, writer & director James Orr (Three Men and a Baby, Father of the Bride, Mr. Destiny), did an amazing job directing my movie despite all the limitations imposed on him, from budget restraints to tight deadlines. So having done all that, getting good people on my side working with me, I didn't want to become a slave to anyone. I didn't want to wait for my movie to travel up the long and tedious chain of command until someone finally made a decision to release it.

Instead, I decided to make movie history, or make the current movie distribution history (who knows?), by releasing Blowing Smoke on this blog.

For the record, this isn’t link-whoring. I have no connection with the movie and the trailer doesn’t much interest me.